Comics-scifi_collectibles Is a Volunteer Community Mentor.
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for the Weekly Chat with eBay Staff. We don't have a specific topic this week, so feel free to share any general buying or selling questions you may have.
The chat thread will remain open until 2 PM PT at which point we'll close it from additional responses. After that time, we'll continue to work on responding to any queries that might still be unanswered.
To post your question, click Reply in the lower right corner of this post, type your question, and hit submit between 1-2 PM Pacific Time. The format of our chat mirrors the format of our Community Discussion Boards, where each post will appear in the thread chronologically. The Community Team will review each question as it comes in, and will quote the original question in our reply. This quote and the reply will appear later in the thread, so just keep scrolling down to see our answers.
Missed the chat? Send your questions to the podcast by calling 888-723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com and maybe your questions will make it on the air! Or listen to past episodes while you wait for next Wednesday!
@alcoforever wrote:How should a buyer respond when he has been a victim of the wrong address scam. This is a scam where the seller sends a small worthless item with tracking to a different addressee in the buyer's same zip code.
The buyer cannot file an INR because tracking shows delivery. I'm told the buyer can't file a SNAD because he has nothing to return.
So what should a buyer do?
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Edit: A reply to your question can be found here
The advice I was given in the past... I think by Trinton... was the buyer still files an INR and then will need to get a letter from the post office stating that the item was delivered to the address on the label but that it was NOT delivered to the buyers address. Then they use the letter to appeal the case. Appeals seem to work best on social media.
I know that this method has worked for many buyers that I have helped.
@windhaze wrote:
Glitches galore here-any update on when they will be fixed?
I know Brian has been working on it but it seems to be getting worse by the day.
Here's the link to where there are many of them posted (although I have seen them posted randomly elsewhere here as well.)
Thanks.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Community-Platform-Feedback/bd-p/CommunityNews
@windhaze progress is being made on several issues. We believe we fixed the Post Flooding error earlier today (if you see otherwise then please tag me in a thread outside of the weekly chat and let me know), and we've also made progress on diagnosing the cause of the Community sign in issue. Hopefully I'll have more updates soon for everyone!
@alboxman wrote:
No refund of FVFs on partial refunds with managed payments
My account was recently moved over to eBay managed payments. Unfortunately, I am now being told that eBay is not refunding FVFs on partial refunds to buyers for combined shipping discounts. Although the process for these refunds was never automatic, eBay previously refunded FVFs when a seller manually requested them (and PayPal, of course, did an automatic refund for their percentage fee WITHOUT requiring a request from the seller).
This becomes significant when you add up all the many ways that eBay prohibits buyers from combining orders, including the following:
The limit eBay has on the number of different items per order (40). So, when a customer buys 120 items from me on the same day, they have to split this in to three orders, each of which has its own postage calculation (and then I have to refund the buyer the excess postage)
The combined weight calculation in eBay is limited to 1 ounce increments, which means there is always an overpricing on very lightweight items. This is particularly a problem when the calculated weight goes over 16 ounces, because the automatic calculations of eBay kick the pricing into priority mail costs.
The KNOWN issue where a certain number of buyers can not add items to their carts under certain circumstances. In a recent week, THREE of my customers ran into this issue and eBay support acknowledged this was a known issue (and hinted it was unlikely to ever be fixed).
The KNOWN issue where a customer can not request a total in their shopping cart whenever the seller has already sent them an invoice. So, if a buyer buys 3 items, and I send them an invoice, and they add a single additional item to their cart, they can not request a total!!
Problems which eBay international customers (and many mobile users) have with the shopping cart.
The inability to do automatic weight calculations between two different shipping rules in eBay.
I (and many other sellers) feel like eBay is deliberately avoiding addressing concerns about problems buyers have with combining orders SPECIFICALLY because eBay makes more fees when the buyer pays extra postage and then the seller refunds the postage.
Frankly, this seems like outright robbery!. The original reason why eBay said they needed to collect FVFs on postage was to prevent sellers from overcharging on postage to avoid fees. But NOW eBay is causing an overcharge of postage rates which bumps up eBay’s revenue. In addition, the reason eBay always claimed that a seller had to MANUALLY request a refund of FVFs was because PayPal was a separate service so they could not do it automatically. I was actually told that one of the reasons eBay was moving to managed payments was to SOLVE issues like this (so they could offer automatic refund of FVFs when a buyer did a refund).
It is almost criminal to not refund the FVFs under any partial refund scenario. I know for a fact that percentage charges which credit cards and PayPal assesses on payments are refunded back to eBay for the portion of the refund that a seller makes. So, eBay actually is getting those REFUNDS back from the credit cards or PayPal and making MORE money when a seller does a partial refund!! And, the original argument eBay made for charging FVFs on postage costs is now shown to be just an excuse that was used to get more fees out of the sellers.
How can we get this charged back to the previous accounting model for refunds? This is a huge mental issue for many sellers, including myself, because we feel eBay has done a “bait and switch” on the model as part of their switch to managed payments, WITHOUT fixing the underlying problems which are preventing buyers from getting the proper combined payments model.
Every refund I now make to a seller for combined shipping (several times each week) leaves me with an awful taste in my mouth for eBay’s refusal to fix any of their many problems related to the shopping cart or other limitation.
Hi @alboxman - I am not aware that there have not been changes to our policy on partial refunds for situations where you and a buyer have agreed to a lower price or shipping cost, and any CS teammate should be able to assist you with that.
However, I cannot speak to specifics within the managed payments program itself, but am happy to escalate this up for further review. Can you let me know when you were told that?
@moritwinterber-2 wrote:
Hello, our Developer Account got suspended without any notice. Can you please advise? I can open a premium ticket, because we cant log in.
@moritwinterber-2 unfortunately eBay customer service doesn't provide support for API Developer accounts as they offer their own support. If there are support options on that page other then premium then you'll need to go through those routes for clarification about the action taken.
@a_c_green wrote:
Hello all!
Per our conversation from last Wednesday (here) and last Monday (here), have you been able to glean any updates from the relevant Engineering people regarding progress on the two problems reported in the past couple of months? I have an update for you on one of them (below), and it's not good.
- Shipping form is loading with package dimensions backwards, in the wrong fields: Length gets the Height value and Height gets the Length value. This will result in wrong coding decisions using those values.
- Blocked Bidder List (here): ID listing is now sorted incomprehensibly by account creation date (using the member's internal ID number), and fails to include a space following each comma between values, forcing the display to break lines on secondary characters only, such as hyphens in the middle of a user ID, and producing a display that's largely gibberish.
I'm afraid I have further bad news on that second item above: the same illiterate coding revision has now been applied to the Buyer Requirements Exemption List (here) as well. It had been displaying correctly as recently as a day or two earlier this week, long after the problems with the similar Blocked Bidder List page had been reported.
This is getting worse, not better. Someone unqualified on the Engineering side is releasing untested code into the Production (public-facing) area of the eBay site, code that would not pass even the most rudimentary QA testing and peer review, and they need to be stopped before further problems are introduced.
Hi @a_c_green - there has been no update when it comes to the first issue (dimensions in shipping forms).
When it comes to the Blocked Bidder List displaying in an unusable manner, that is a known issue currently being reviewed/resolved. I will add your account to the open ticket if that has not already been done.
Thanks!
I can give this a go. I'm a seller that is active in MP and I may be able to address at least some of your questions. I didn't address anything but a couple items in your post because I don't think any of that other stuff had anything to do with MP.
No refund of FVFs on partial refunds with managed payments
My account was recently moved over to eBay managed payments. Unfortunately, I am now being told that eBay is not refunding FVFs on partial refunds to buyers for combined shipping discounts. Although the process for these refunds was never automatic, eBay previously refunded FVFs when a seller manually requested them (and PayPal, of course, did an automatic refund for their percentage fee WITHOUT requiring a request from the seller).
This policy is unchanged. Pre MP or in MP Ebay has never automatically given these credits on partial refunds. You can however still call Ebay and request the credits as you wish to do. But nothing has changed. It is the same as before.
This becomes significant when you add up all the many ways that eBay prohibits buyers from combining orders, including the following:
The limit eBay has on the number of different items per order (40). So, when a customer buys 120 items from me on the same day, they have to split this in to three orders, each of which has its own postage calculation (and then I have to refund the buyer the excess postage)...
This is also not changed because of MP. 40 line items per invoice has been the norm in Ebay as far back as I remember.
Problems which eBay international customers (and many mobile users) have with the shopping cart.
The inability to do automatic weight calculations between two different shipping rules in eBay.
Yes this continues to be a problem in MP or not.
@georgestobbard wrote:
Hi, Tyler. and Brian. In last week's chat, there was a question about the sudden disappearance of "pre-owned" from the list of choices we could select as the item condition in the Fragrances category. Is the eBay team ready to say whether this is a permanent change or just a glitch lasting a few days like what happened in the summer of 2019?
Some buyers search only under Fragrances and they would not know to search under Vanity, Perfume, and Shaving unless eBay educates them about the existence of this category as the place to go for bottles that are empty or only partly full. I also worry that first-time sellers might be stymied if they try to list a used bottle or an empty bottle and the eBay listing template doesn't explicit state that this could go into a category other than Fragrances.
Thanks for looking into this.
@georgestobbard I'm still doing some digging on this one to get an official answer. I'll post again in this weekly chat when I have an answer. Thanks for following up!
